The Trans Mississippi Exposition of 1898

Contents

1. A recession builds a fair
2. The site and the buildings
3. The summer of 1898
4. The art it popularized
5. What it left and what it did not

In Omaha, Nebraska, Brent O’Mara works and lives, and the city once built itself a world’s fair out of hemp fiber, cement and plaster of Paris. The materials explain the event. The Trans Mississippi and International Exposition of 1898 needed eleven large white buildings and dozens of small ones in a single year, and brick and stone would have cost too much time and money, so the organizers chose a mixture meant to look like marble for one summer and then crumble.¹ The Omaha Public Library’s director has called it a 184 acre city built mainly of hemp fiber and plaster that drew more than 2.6 million visitors in five months.³ Everything about the fair, from its finances to its legacy, follows from the decision to build for a season.

A recession builds a fair

The idea came out of hard times. The Omaha World Herald traces it to the Panic of 1893, set off by a building bubble and a series of bank failures, which sent cattle and grain prices down and left the city’s businessmen looking for a way out of the recession. A group of them met in 1896 and decided a world’s fair might provide it. They had an example in Chicago’s fair of 1893, which had drawn 27 million people, and a spokesman in William Jennings Bryan, the populist and former newspaper editor, who came out for the plan. Congress appropriated $100,000. A banker named Gurdon Wattles took the chair, the board raised the rest, and the architect Thomas Kimball, who would later design the Burlington Station and the public library, was hired to oversee construction.¹

The site and the buildings

The land came from a developer. Herman Kountze had been failing to sell pasture lots in what is now north Omaha, and he offered the tract free on condition that the streets, sidewalks and utilities the fair built would be his when it closed; the grounds ran roughly from 16th to 24th Streets between Pratt and Pinkney.¹ The Durham Museum’s gallery on the fair describes the 184 acre Kountze Tract and the White City that was only ever meant to last the summer.⁴ Hanscom Park, the city’s oldest, formed in 1872 when two developers gave the city 57.6 hilly acres they could not build on, had been the runner up for the site, which says something about how far north the fair reached from the built up city.⁶

Figure

From the Panic of 1893 to the last day

1. 01
   1893A building bubble and bank failures set off a panic that sends cattle and grain prices down; Chicago holds its own world's fair the same year.
2. 02
   1896Omaha businessmen meet and decide a world's fair might lift the city out of the recession; Congress later appropriates $100,000.
3. 03
   June 1, 1898The fair opens after a year of construction, at 50 cents for adults and a quarter for children.
4. 04
   October 12, 1898President McKinley speaks from the steps of the domed government building to a crowd estimated at 110,000.
5. 05
   October 31, 1898The fair closes; the buildings are already crumbling, and a second fair on the site in 1899 fails.

After a harried year of work for thousands of carpenters, plumbers and electricians, the fair opened on June 1, 1898, with the white buildings around a lagoon where visitors took gondola rides, a 278 foot domed government building at the head of the court, a miniature railroad, horseless carriages, a Cairo street, babies in incubators, and on the outskirts an Indian Congress at which 500 Native Americans, Geronimo among them, were put on display for the crowds.¹

The summer of 1898

Fairgoers came on the nine railroads that stopped in Omaha, and many residents went several times, which is how a city of about a hundred thousand recorded attendance of some 2.6 million.¹ Its success rested on hundreds of women who worked as organizers, employees, performers and reporters, a side of the fair the library drew out in a 2018 exhibition built on the images of its official photographer, Frank Rinehart.² The high point came on October 12, when President McKinley walked arm in arm with Wattles through a crowd estimated at 110,000, climbed the steps of the domed building and spoke, with the national press in attendance.¹ On Halloween it was over.

The fair was also a business of its own. Adults paid 50 cents and children a quarter, the exhibits ran from a Cairo street scene to fortune tellers on the midway and ostriches pulling carriages, and the flowery newspaper accounts of the day described visitors stunned by the white buildings that glittered under electric light each night.¹ The library’s collection of what people carried home, amateur photographs, postcards and souvenirs, is the physical record of that summer, and a 2014 novel set at the fair sent the library back into its own archives to mount an exhibition with the Durham Museum and private collectors.³

Figure

The fair by the numbers

height of the domed government building

278 feet

large white buildings around the lagoon

11

railroads that brought fairgoers to Omaha

9

Native Americans gathered at the Indian Congress

500

The art it popularized

The fair also made a reputation for a private gallery. A 1971 article in Nebraska History tells how George Lininger, an implement dealer who had sold his first company in 1879 and spent the next decade touring Europe and buying paintings, opened a gallery behind his home on North 18th Street in November 1888, thirty five by seventy feet under a skylight, and let the public in free. Before the Exposition he retinted the ceiling, added new skylights and converted the conservatory into more gallery space, and during the fair some 20,000 people viewed his roughly three hundred paintings, open daily from nine to five.⁵ His gallery had already led to the Western Art Association in 1889 and brought a pupil of Thomas Eakins to Omaha to run an academy. After Lininger’s death in 1907 the collection was rarely seen, and when it was auctioned in 1927 about half of it stayed in the city, much of it eventually at the Joslyn Art Museum, which opened in 1931 and whose founder bought at that sale.⁵

Figure

What the fair left and what it did not

	Lasted	Did not last
The grounds	Streets, sewers, electricity, streetcar service and a park	The eleven palaces, torn down in 1899
The economy	Hotels and saloons did well for a summer	Department stores gained less than hoped and the population did not jump
The reputation	A summer when Omaha held the national stage	A second fair in 1899 that lost money

What it left and what it did not

The World Herald’s judgment, drawing on the historian Jeffrey Spencer, is that the glory was fleeting. The hotels and saloons did well, the department stores less so, the population did not jump, and Omaha did not take a place beside Chicago or St. Louis. A group of entrepreneurs tried a second fair on the grounds in 1899 and lost money. Kountze never found his booming market for lots, though he did get Kountze Park, which sits today at the center of the old grounds.¹ The Durham’s account is kinder: the fair ushered in a period of renewed growth, and when the White City came down in 1899 it left the neighborhood roads, sewers, electricity, a park and streetcar service.⁴ Both can be true, and the difference between them is mostly a matter of what one counts. Measured against the dreams of 1896, a city that would stand beside Chicago, the fair failed; measured against the pasture it was built on, it left a neighborhood. What did not last was the stage; what lasted was infrastructure and a habit among the city’s bankers and railroad men of financing large civic projects together, a habit visible in the stockyards a decade earlier and in the insurance and finance headquarters of the century that followed.

Where to see it in person: Kountze Park, between 19th and 21st Streets north of Pratt, occupies the middle of the fairgrounds, and its pond stands roughly where the lagoon was. The Durham Museum, in the former Union Station described under Omaha and the Union Pacific, keeps a permanent Trans Mississippi Exposition gallery of souvenirs, photographs and artifacts.⁴ The Omaha Public Library holds the memorabilia collection it has shown in two exhibitions, including Rinehart’s photographs, postcards and the things women took home from the fair.²³ Paintings from the Lininger gallery hang at the Joslyn, and the surgical instruments from Pompeii and three Egyptian mummies the university bought at the 1927 auction are at the state museum in Morrill Hall in Lincoln.⁵ Hanscom Park, the site that lost, still has its lagoon too.⁶